


lossless

by arbitrarily



Category: Roadies (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Future Fic, Infidelity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-24
Updated: 2016-09-24
Packaged: 2018-08-16 01:53:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8082046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: So, the future is a love song. The Staton-House Band breaks up after the Capture the Flag tour in 2016. Kelly Ann and Reg meet again in New York, seven years later.





	

**Author's Note:**

> So this show got cancelled?! I meant to finish writing this literally months ago?!?! Spoilers through the entire first season/series, with some minor divergence from canon events around 1.09. 
> 
> And, [a playlist](http://8tracks.com/arbitrarym/invisible-hits) as you read, if you're so inclined!

 

 

there are some mornings when the sky looks like a road.  
JOANNA NEWSOM

  

some say when you go halfway you only have halfway to go.  
LUCIUS

 

 

 

  

** 1. **

So, the future is a love song.

This is the first line of “And Tomorrow And Tomorrow And Tomorrow,” her third favorite Staton-House Band song. It’s the last song on their second album. There’s a really embarrassing video floating around on YouTube where Christopher explains the song, clearly a few drinks deep. Kelly Ann only watched the video once and got nervous midway through; she was sure, that late night she had been curled up in her bed, lit by the muted glow of her laptop, she was going to ruin the song by listening to Christopher’s drunken mess of an explanation. A song like that, she had wanted to time travel and interrupt, doesn’t need an explanation. Didn’t he know that?: a song can be ruined. 

So the future is a love song. So this is a love song after all. 

Kelly Ann rolls over, the mattress creaking under her. Reg is splayed out, taking up most of the bed. It’s late summer and she’s sweaty, her skin sticking to his where they touch. She groans when she rolls away from him, her shoulder colliding with the wall. “Ow,” she mutters, mouth gummy with sleep. 

She pushes her hair off her face and glances over at him. The morning light is aggressive and bright filtering in through the thin curtain, shifting in the artificial cold of the air conditioning unit beneath it. Reg snores. 

This is New York. An apartment that never felt her own, an apartment she soon will be leaving. This is after.

Kelly Ann rolls back to him, his bare thigh between her bare legs as she presses her chest to his, her face in his. A quiet grunt from him and he blinks slowly, says something that sounds like _what time is it_ but his words are slurred and smushed together, flattened by his accent. 

She drags her fingers over his jaw, the grown-in beard prickling under her fingertips. “I can’t decide if I like this,” she says, mocking.

His eyes are open now and his mouth twitches. She likes the way he looks at her sometimes – slight and minute incredulity that flickers small across his face, as if he can’t help but embrace an element of the disbelief where she’s concerned.

His breath smells the same way her mouth tastes: rancid and stale. He opens his mouth to say something, but she beats him to it – she doesn’t kiss him but she licks along his teeth, behind them. Likes how he shifts under her, how his hand latches tight onto her thigh, his fingers tangle in the hair hanging in her face, and –

So, a love song. It only took seven years. 

 

 

The first love song Kelly Ann ever truly remembers hearing is “Silly Love Songs” by Wings. She considers this to be super, incredibly unfortunate. She remembers being a kid, hearing it on her neighbor’s, Tricia Gifford’s, radio in the kitchen, those long days Kelly Ann and Wes were left with her. But more than the song she remembers the longing on Tricia Gifford’s face while she listened to it. How her face would change, become someone else’s, someone Kelly Ann had never met before, who belonged to someone else entirely – to herself, completely. Even then, at the age of five or however old Kid Kelly Ann was, she understood this song to be A Big Deal and she paid attention accordingly. “I love you,” Tricia Gifford sang along, mixing pancake batter in a bowl or she was washing the lunch dishes or engaging in any other kitchen-bound act of domesticity Kelly Ann to this day exclusively attaches to Tricia Gifford.

Or, there was “(I’ve Had) The Time Of My Life,” a product of not only repeated viewings of _Dirty Dancing_ on VHS but the summer camp their foster parents sent her and Wes to when they were both fourteen. There was a dance on the last night and the girls borrowed each other’s contraband lipgloss and they played that song as the big climactic final number and to Kelly Ann, it was almost like the movie had become reality. Like a song could be bigger than life and escape the confines of fiction and be Something Real. She danced with Andy Lewandowski and because this was supposed to be Something Real, she had kissed him, planted her mouth on him, her first kiss marred by the confused look on his face, as if he had no idea this was what was expected between a boy and a girl at a dance at the sweaty end of a shared summer. Like he had no idea that this was what a song like this could make a girl want. It was, like most romantic ventures in Kelly Ann’s life, humiliating. 

Neither of those are her favorite love songs. Not by a long shot. Her favorite love song isn’t even by the Staton-House Band, which feels a bit like an act of betrayal. Actually, come to think of it, she’s not entirely sure what her favorite love song is. There’s too many to choose from. Maybe it’s Patti Smith’s “Because the Night.” Or “Maps” by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. She doesn’t seek love songs out, but she collects them all the same, even if they sometimes make her feel as if she has missed out on something vital in her own life. Maybe it’s Beach House’s “Take Care.” Or “A Case of You” by Joni Mitchell.

Or, maybe, she hasn’t heard it yet.

 

 

 

 

** 2. **

It’s been seven years since the Staton-House Band broke up in Los Angeles. Seven years since Phil died, since Christopher House walked out on the band in the name of Janine. Since they all went their separate ways. 

Kelly Ann is back in New York; she’s been here for awhile. She has an apartment that still doesn’t feel like hers. She’s renting, not owning, a distinction that seems to matter to every person who asks her about her living situation. She has a fiancé; renting, not buying. 

Kelly Ann hasn’t been in one place for a long time. Since she was a kid. First, the foster homes. Then, on tour. And now – she travels nonstop photographing High and Low art: celebrities and human disaster, the occasional overlap between the two. Floods in West Virginia, fires in Los Angeles, tornadoes in Kansas. The singer-songwriter who tanked her own career when she went on a profanity-laden rant against the Illuminati at the Grammys. The actress who fled Scientology. Rick Bayless, formerly of the Staton-House Band. Traveling now is different than being on the road with the band – a curious isolation comes with it she can’t decide if she relishes or fears. She feels similarly about her own career.

She doesn’t like to, but in New York Kelly Ann goes to a lot of parties. The venues vary, and so do the hors d’oeuvres, but the party itself remains the same. Kelly Ann has been told by her agent that her attendance is a part of “cultivating an image.”

Rather than finding out what that might mean, Kelly Ann makes appearances and increasingly aggressive small talk and finds she enjoys that more than anything: watching her conversational partner’s face dip down into the uncomfortable and tense.

It’s at one of these parties when she spots him: Reg. Reg Whitehead. Reg fucking Whitehead, in the flesh. Holding court, a small cluster of similarly-suited men around him. She feels her own mouth go first slack and then clenched, her hand still gripping the glass of wine she has barely lifted off the waitress’s tray. He has better posture now, she decides, as if time and money form a potent tonic for that.

“Ma’am?” the waitress says and Kelly Ann takes the glass, still staring. He hasn’t seen her yet. He hasn’t seen her, which means she can still avoid him. 

Kelly Ann spins on her heel and all but collides with the woman behind her. She grins, manically, up at the woman. 

“Hi!” Kelly Ann says to her, too bright, too desperate to engage anyone but Reg. Reg, who she hasn’t seen – Jesus, seven years. Seven years, Phil’s fucking wake. 

The woman eyes Kelly Ann with a wary curiosity, as if she’s trying to place Kelly Ann in the roster of women she knows. The woman is very tall, very chic, tightly pulled back blonde hair and the kind of bland clothing with clean lines that speaks of great wealth, or at the least, supposed great taste. 

“Kelly Ann Mason,” Kelly Ann says, offering her the hand not clutching the wine glass. 

The woman’s eyes brighten and she takes Kelly Ann’s hand. “The photographer,” she says. She sounds like Katharine Hepburn or something. Kelly Ann nods. “I’m Leigh,” the woman says, and finally, their hands shake. 

“My husband is a big fan of yours,” Leigh says.

“Oh yeah?” Kelly Ann awkwardly rubs at the back of her neck. “That’s, uh, nice. Tell him I said thanks for the support.”

Leigh, already severely beautiful, is even more terrifying when she laughs. “You can tell him yourself. Darling.”

Kelly Ann felt it the second she said it: that sinking in her gut. It’s Reg. It’s gonna be Reg, she’s gonna grab him by the arm, she chose the one person at this party to talk to that would lead her straight to him.

“Kelly Ann.” Reg’s voice is high, disbelieving when he says her name.

“Hi, Reg.”

Leigh registers surprise well: despite the dip between her eyebrows, her face remains placid. “Do you two – ” she turns to Reg. “You never told me that you knew her,” the _her_ said as if Kelly Ann isn’t standing in front of them.

“I’m sure that I had,” he says. His gaze doesn’t leave Kelly Ann; it’s like he wants to grin but is trying hard to suppress it. He looks mostly the same, Kelly Ann decides, but different enough to throw her off. He’s grown a beard. She can’t decide if it suits him. 

“How do you two – ” Leigh keeps saying _you two_ and then trailing off, as if the only way to refer to them is as a pair, a herculean task for a woman used to occupying one half of that role. 

“We were on that Staton-House Band tour, a million years ago.” Reg still staring at her. 

Leigh laughs. “That’s right! Back in your wild rock n’roll days. I can’t even imagine.”

Kelly Ann is momentarily glad for it. She doesn’t think this woman – even with the ring on her finger and the promises of marital fidelity that go with it – has that right. To imagine it. To know Reg like that.

The overwhelm of seeing him again is catching up with her. She’s having a hard time looking at him, quietly cataloging all the differences between this Reg and the one she had known. Like one of those puzzles in the back of a kids’ magazine,  FIND THE DIFFERENCE . There are more lines around his eyes when he smiles, and when he smiles – which is a lot; she can’t decide if she deserves credit for it – it’s more self-assured than she remembers. 

“Excuse me,” Kelly Ann says quietly. She reaches a hand, as if she might touch Reg, but quickly draws it back. “It was great,” and she stops, glances over at Leigh. “A pleasure,” and she ducks out around them. She crashes out of the restaurant, her mostly full glass of wine still held tight in her hand as she steps out onto the sidewalk. “Ma’am, ma’am, _ma’am,_ ” she hears shouted behind her. The hostess. Christ. Kelly Ann, embarrassed, sloshes wine over her hand in her hurry to give back the glass.

She steps out onto the sidewalk and tries to flag down a cab.

Reg follows her out. She knows it even before he says anything. She looks at him over her shoulder, her arms hugged around her body even though the night is warm. 

“That was weird. In there,” she says before he can say anything. “I was weird. I’m sorry, about that.” 

He shakes his head, steps closer. 

“Congratulations,” she says quickly, cutting him off again. “Belated congratulations. On,” she jerks her head towards the restaurant and Leigh inside it.

Reg doesn’t say anything, until: “It’s wonderful to see you.” He says it like a revelation.

She parts her mouth to say something in reply, but nothing comes. “I have to take that cab,” she says.

 

 

Seven years ago, Reg had shown up in New Orleans the same day Wes did. If Kelly Ann was a believer in coincidence or predestination or divine intervention, maybe that would mean something to her.

That night, after New Orleans, a bunk bestowed upon Wes formerly occupied by one of the crew Reg fired. Wes immediately brought into the fold, and of course he was. 

Wes preoccupied with his phone and a cold slice of pizza, Donna laid out length-wise along the seat, and Kelly Ann had a toothbrush hanging out of her mouth, an empty plastic cup in hand to spit in. All anyone wanted to talk about was either Phil or Reg. 

After, Kelly Ann remembers when she first saw him – across an entire crowded room, a man in a nice coat, neat-looking, as if he did not belong there but like maybe he should. Revisionist history gives that moment weight in her mind. That she knew he was a big deal. That he was going to be a big deal. She’s half right: she knew something, just not everything. 

“He’s the fucking Wolf of Wall Street is what he is,” Kelly Ann had said that night, mouth frothing around her toothbrush. Reg, and his three-piece suit, like he was a banker or a funeral director or a magician. Totally tragic.

“He’s Jordan Belfort?” Wes said flatly, his eyes still glued to his phone. Donna snorted, looking at Wes and not Kelly Ann. 

Kelly Ann was kinda surprised Wes knew the name. The specificity and randomness of the things Wes did and did not know never failed to catch her off guard. “Well, not, like, literally.”

“Is he hooked on quaaludes?” Wes almost looked interested now.

“You know, not to my knowledge. But then again, nothing in our conversation or one-on-one interaction really pointed to that? And you know, you’re being really rather pedantic about the whole thing. I meant it to be … ,” Kelly Ann spat in the cup, “analogous.”

“Analogous?” Wes snickered. He turned to face her. “Don’t you feel bad we completely missed out on the age of the quaalude?”

“I’m glad that’s what you’re taking away from this conversation. Good talk.”

Kelly Ann took a seat next to Wes, reached for his pizza only for him to lift it out of her reach. She settled in with a frown.

“He’s going to ruin anything,” Kelly Ann said.

“Then what the hell you come back here for?” Donna said.

 

 

Later that month, Kelly Ann finds herself at 30 Rockefeller Center to shoot behind-the-scenes _SNL_ photos for a magazine feature. It’s a favor more-so than an actual job. She doesn’t know what to do with herself when she isn’t working. 

They run into each other in the elevator. Apparently, somewhere between Los Angeles seven years ago and today, Reg had left London, got a job at NBC Universal, and shot up the ladder. 

They grab lunch together, at his insistence, the both of them keeping to separate corners of the elevator as if more distance between them might make this more manageable. They sit down at the same table in awkward silence.

“You kept your hair,” he starts, stops, gestures towards her. 

“Unbrushed?”

“No. Yours.”

She can’t stop replaying it in her head – the look on his face when he first saw her at that party, how his voice went breathless and high when he said her name. He said it like something a man such as himself would try to wish on.

She blinks and shifts her gaze from him down to her salad. Kelly Ann had rewritten Reg as some sort of youthful indiscretion. Like a bad haircut or a heartfelt allegiance to an even worse band. He was the money man she knew and maybe wanted to know more of on the road during her wild tour days. Nothing more than that.

“How is everyone?” he asks.

“Everyone?” she repeats, and then she shrugs. Truthfully, they all went their own ways after L.A. Donna wound up joining Halsey and then numerous other tours, Kelly Ann losing touch with her roughly three years ago. Wes has a kid, opened a coffee shop in Cleveland. He’s happy. She’s happy for him. Janine left Christopher House, again. This time, so did Bill and his allegiances. Christopher House is now supposedly a hermit in fucking Silver Lake, releasing increasingly weird shit on Soundcloud.

It doesn’t feel right to talk about Christopher to Reg, what with the lawsuit. Chris House versus Reg, the band, the record label, et al, all over the boxset Reg had wanted to release after the final tour. Chris didn’t want the bootlegs out there, didn’t want anything other than the albums that already existed. It didn’t matter – there was still the final album, written over the last leg of the last tour, released posthumously after the band broke up. It didn’t matter because Christopher lost, and in one of the last public interviews he did he said that’s all an artist in the day-and-age ever does: lose.

So dramatic. It was shit like that that almost made Kelly Ann feel something sour and akin to regret.

So she doesn’t talk to Reg about Chris. Instead, she spits out, quickly and without prelude: “I’m engaged.”

“Congratulations?” he says, his mouthful, that same look of mild, nervous shock to him, that same look that marks him as familiar to her. 

She shrugs. “We’re not gonna get married. It’s been a year and I still don’t even have a ring. What’s the point.”

Reg is looking at her like he’s waiting for a punchline. There isn’t one; just her and Sam and the promise of a wedding that will never reach fruition. “Glad to hear that romantic heart of yours still beats behind the barricade,” he finally says.

“I’m only being spend-centric,” she says and she grins. So does he.

She pushes her food around her plate. “We won’t get married,” she says again. “It’s just nice to pretend you’ll do things you know you’ll never do.”

“Is it?” he asks. She glances at him and just as quickly looks away when she finds him watching her. This entire lunch reminds her so much of the early days of that final tour, when he had first joined them. That careful way they had both felt each other out, how obvious he was in his attempts to befriend her. 

He clears his throat. “You’ve done well for yourself,” he says, a leading grin. “I saw the _New York Times Magazine_ profile.”

“Christ on a bike,” she grumbles under her breath. She fixes Reg with a hard stare. Of all things to bring up. This is the problem with running into people you once knew: they have to remind you how much they know about you. What Kelly Ann wants to tell him is that that article was a piece of shit. What she wants to say is that she feels a bit like a fraud. She doesn’t know how she got here. The photographs that had earned her fame had been purely accidental, any art to be found in them a casual reactive instinct. She doesn’t deserve credit for that. 

Most days, she feels as if she has fallen into this success, this person she has become, and therefore she cannot trust it. She spends too much of her time waiting for someone to find her out, reveal the truth: there is nothing here.

Instead, what she says is: “And so have you. Although, I’m not entirely clear what it is you do here?”

Reg laughs. “No one does. But the money is good.”

 

 

Kelly Ann is famous for the photo she took of Rick. She took the photo after she slept with him. It’s never been clear to her if both parts of that story are what contributed to the interest in her.

She racked up more famous photos after that, in particular the summer of the rolling blackouts in New York. Then came her Apartment Series. Then the empty houses followed by the empty dinner tables. Voyeurism as art; she excelled at making people feel like they were missing something.

According to the _New York Times Magazine_ profile, this all spoke to a painful inner loneliness that could belong only to an outsider like her. 

The reporter wrote about Kelly Ann’s big eyes, compared them to camera lenses, called her fragile and breakable, that the appeal with her is obvious in how broken she seems, how hard she tries to disguise it. It’s insulting. _One cannot help but feel an instinct to cover and protect Mason, perhaps even from herself. Her face reads as an open book, betraying an entire history of missed opportunities and regret her wide, tremulous mouth bravely denies. I ask her about her mother and that mouth opens like an old wound_.

The article is a piece of shit.

 

 

 

 

**3.**

When she gets back to her apartment, she digs out the old Staton-House Band t-shirts she kept. She pulls one on before climbing into bed. Sam doesn’t like it when she’s sentimental; he’s told her that before. That she’s uninteresting then, and she had laughed because that implied she was generally an interesting person otherwise. 

Sam glances down at her t-shirt before he gets into the bed beside her. “I heard a rumor they might do a reunion tour.”

She rolls her eyes, closes the book in her lap, her hand covering Patti Smith’s face. “There’s not going to be a reunion tour.”

Maybe it’s the mention of the all-too-dim possibility of a future tour or maybe it’s just acknowledging the band out loud, or it’s the day that passed earlier, but Kelly Ann says, “I ran into someone, today. From the tour, I guess.”

“From the tour you guess?” She doesn’t know why she phrased it that way, but she’s never been able to figure out the accurate way to categorize Reg. He was never one of them, but he also belonged to them, to her, in such a personal, possessive, intimate way. There’s not a word for that, and despite the conversational limitations it imposes, she is glad there isn’t. That makes it beyond comment. 

“He did the money.”

She looks down at her clasped hands where there isn’t a ring and beside her the sheets rustle, the mattress dips. 

“He have a name?”

“Yes,” Kelly Ann says. She looks up at his face and she smiles. 

The t-shirt is threadbare, smells musty and old, having lived in the bottom of suitcases for years, the bottom of this drawer since she moved here. It’s the old Joy Hotel logo; she doesn’t have much merch from that final tour.

“Were you two,” he asks, “were you together?” Jealousy is completely absent from the question; instead, it’s all impersonal curiosity. Like he’s solving a puzzle and wants to know which piece fits where. Like he’s never been able to abide how Kelly Ann hoards her history to herself and he will take any small crumb she offers him. 

“No. Not really,” she says, distracted. “Not seriously.”

The city is dark outside the window next to her and suddenly she misses everyone. 

“But you were?”

“Not in any real way,” she lies. “It was a million years ago.”

 

 

She calls Shelli. Or, she tries to call Shelli. The old number she has for her, back when the Staton-House Band had unceremoniously ended its tour, which has since, in the seven years that spread between, been disconnected.

Kelly Ann has an assistant she doesn’t really like to use, except for when it comes to PR expectations or gallery bookings or declining invitations Kelly Ann never had any intention of attending.

She calls her assistant (Mirandah, the _h_ at the end non-negotiable). “Hey, it’s Kelly Ann.”

“Yes. I’m aware.”

“Yeah, would you mind doing me a favor? Could you maybe get me Shelli Anderson’s number?”

“Shelli Anderson,” she repeats back.

“Yeah,” Kelly Ann says again. “She used to be production manager for the Staton-House Band, but that was, you know. Eons ago. Last I heard she was St. Vincent’s tour manager, but I’m not sure if that’s what she’s still doing.”

“And you want her number?”

“If you don’t mind.” Kelly Ann is still unsure how one treats an underling. 

Mirandah gets her the number. It’s not her private number, but her office number. Shelli had left the road, working now as the band manager for some upstart all-girl rock outfit out of Detroit. Kelly Ann calls the number late in afternoon and gets a receptionist. She’s not sure what she expected, but for whatever reason, it hadn’t been a gatekeeper.

“Hi, I was hoping to speak to Shelli Anderson?” She gives the receptionist her name, and pauses, unsure what she wants to say.

“The Kelly Ann Mason?” the receptionist says, pronouncing it _thee_.

“Yeah, that’s me.” Another pause. “I’m an old friend. Or an old employee? Both, maybe? And I … it’s personal, not business. If you wanna tell her that. I was just thinking and it’s funny, right? How fast time goes by and how easily you fall out with people who used to be in your life every single moment of every single day, which I guess is just another way of saying I realized I missed her? And I was just hoping to catch up. You know what, you don’t need to tell her any of that. I’ll give you my number which you can give to her and if she wants to, she can call me. Okay? Okay.”

 

 

 

 

**4.**

In Nashville, they stopped at a barbecue place after the whole Bryce Newman debacle. Kelly Ann had never eaten more barbecue than she had on that tour. She was stuffed, but she kept picking at an unattended plate of cold macaroni and cheese someone had left at the table. She was alone, until Reg sat down across from her, a brief, tentative, nod of his head. She chewed with her mouth open and didn’t say a thing.

A cover band had taken the stage over by the bar. They weren’t a very good cover band, she thought. It was a real fine line to walk with cover bands: you wanted to sound unique enough to be interesting and not too slavish to the original, but you were trying to match what people already knew and loved of a song that existed before and without you. It was a delicate science.

“I, um, wanted,” Reg said, pausing to clear his throat, “to, ah, clear the air. Between us.”

“I didn’t know we had air that needed clearing.” She said it all haughty and she liked how his eyes narrowed a little, trying to parse if she was kidding or not. If his temper was warranted. She wanted to find Shelli and tell her that she was very funny after all; she was full of so many little jokes. It wasn’t her fault everyone else was too dumb to get them.

“I used to love this song,” she said randomly. It was “Buddy Holly,” Weezer, a honky-tonk version of it. It didn’t work. They had failed as a cover band – she wished she could hear the original. 

“I’ve been trying,” Reg said. “To listen to the band more. The Staton-House Band,” he said, all careful and deliberate, like there might be another band they had all been secretly talking about and caring about and working for this entire time.

Kelly Ann scowled. “Like, their ideas?”

“No. Their music.”

“Oh,” she said. She wasn’t sure what she had expected him to say, but it wasn’t that. She tried to envision it: Reg sitting there, alone, in his bunk on the bus, earbuds in, frowning, listening the wrong way because Kelly Ann still totally believed there was a right and a wrong way to listen to a song.

“I just want you to know, not everyone approaches this job and this tour as a fan.”

“Don’t do that,” she said, shaking her head a little at him. “Don’t belittle me.”

“I’m not. I simply wish for you to understand where I am coming from.”

She cocked her head. “You’re like George Clooney in that one movie where George Clooney’s car gets blown up.”

Reg squinted at her. “I will choose to view that as a compliment.”

“It’s really not.”

He kept talking (something about management and motivation) and Kelly Ann stopped listening.

“What was that movie called? That guy leaves that voicemail,” Kelly Ann said. “And he’s crazy, you know? Ranting and raving about insurance fraud? I think? Maybe? He’s all, Michael. I see everything. _Michael Clayton_! That’s it.”

Reg was still talking; it was amazing how much men were fueled by the sound of their own voice.

“That’s not it,” Kelly Ann said. “I mean, it’s a movie, but it’s not the one I’m thinking of. I think I’m thinking of the one where he’s in a lot of airports and kinda, like, sad about it, and on a lot of airplanes, and he fires a lot of people?”

“Do your job and I’m not going to fire you. Same goes for your brother.” He said it like he was laughing at her – not in a bad way, but like she was some kind of amusing impossibility to him.

“That’s exactly what George Clooney in an airport would say.”

“You said you used to,” he said, the sudden subject shift jarring.

“What?” Kelly Ann pointed at the mostly empty plate in front of him. It wasn’t Reg’s. There was a cold biscuit on it. “You gonna eat that?”

“No. You used to love this song?”

“Yeah.” She reached and snagged the biscuit, still some butter on it. She mumbled, her mouth full of crumbs, “Buddy Holly.”

She explained it to him then, why she didn’t like this song anymore, incredibly sincere about it despite herself. She could hear herself talking, a total deluge of personal information, and she wasn’t entirely sure why she was telling him any of this. How she used to listen to this song all the time, like, all the time. How it became a part of her life, of who she was, and she was what? Eighteen? And you didn’t mean to, but you attached songs to people and places and parts of your life and sometimes, if you were lucky, you loved the song enough or if the song was great enough to unstick itself from these associations and you could listen to it again, maybe for forever, but there were other songs, and these? They became casualties to memory and time and history, you know? You heard them and you weren’t hearing the song anymore. You were hearing who you used to be and where you were and who you loved or who you wanted to love, and if you could tolerate that, then more power to you, but it took a whole lot of energy to revisit old ghosts and it wasn’t even about the song anymore, but you. You were hearing it over the radio at a Waffle House while you were throwing up banana pancake chunks in a really, really, just absolutely disgusting bathroom in Charlotte, North Carolina because you drank way too much the night before and because you and your friends and your brother’s friends, which meant they weren’t really your friends but his, but that was a whole other story, decided to blow off high school graduation and follow Pearl Jam on tour for the summer. Like a bunch of assholes without any future plans.

“Pancakes at the Waffle House,” Reg said, his face soft and difficult for her to look at.

“Yeah. Weezer when it was supposed to be all about Pearl Jam.” She held her fork aloft, like a laser pointer mid-presentation when a new idea has struck. “I think sometimes you have to do the opposite that’s expected of you. Just to prove you have a point of view.”

“I’ve never found that to be true.”

The song ended and the crowd cheered, the gaze held between them.

“Well,” she finally said. “You and I are very different people.”

 

 

 

 

**5.**

“Kelly Ann? Um, hi. I got your number, from my wife, actually,” a nervous laugh. “She knows some gallery owners, and one of them, I suppose, knew you, and I. I’m glad we ran into each other. Twice. I’m glad I saw you. I’ve, I’ve missed you, which I hope you won’t consider too forward a thing to say, but I have, and I would like it if we could see each other again.” He clears his throat. “My wife is having a dinner party, two weeks from Saturday. I’d love it if,” another nervous laugh. “Well. Do call.”

A pause. “This is Reg by the way.”

 

 

 

 

**6.**

Kelly Ann took the corner too fast, winding down the hall from the loading dock. She took herself, her skateboard, and Reg down to the ground. Lucky for her: his body broke her fall. 

This was Minneapolis. 

“Ow,” he said, muffled, underneath her. Kelly Ann caught him in the gut with her elbow when she tried to get up. He said, “ _Ow_ ,” again, whinier and more pointed this time. 

She snorted, her hand flying up to her mouth to try and keep the laugh in she felt exploding anyway. She was still draped over his lower body, and he boggled up at her, like he couldn’t believe her or gravity or some third universal truth, until his gaze drifted lower and his face softened. “You’re bleeding,” he said. She glanced down at her elbow, and sure enough, it was scraped raw and bloody.

“Huh,” she said, contorting her jaw in a grimace. “Ow,” she dead-panned. She shrugged then. She was still sitting on him and it was like they both noticed it at the same time. She could feel him tense up underneath her. 

“Did I break you?” she asked finally, her tone the same, flat and almost mean.

“Not yet, though I do feel it’d be remiss of me not to mention the numerous safety concerns I’ve – ”

“Oh my god,” she groaned, scrambling off of him. He struggled to his feet beside her. And maybe it was out of a misplaced sense of guilt (or a completely rightly placed sense of guilt because it was her that barreled into him out of nowhere), but she found herself saying, “There’s a party. Tonight.”

“There’s a party tonight,” he repeated, like this was some foreign language course and they were at the _repeat after me_ step.

“If you’re not doing anything – whatever it is you do for fun, like, citizen’s arrests, or whatever, you could. You know.”

“I could you know what,” he said, but he was smiling at her.

“You could join us,” she said, bending over to pick up her skateboard. “There. Your engraved invitation.”

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Yeah. Okay. I’ll join you.”

 

 

That night, the balcony of Milo’s motel room, Kelly Ann was sitting in a cheap broken plastic chair, Reg leaning against the railing after he came out, surveying the parking lot. It was a chilly night; she had a sweater bundled around her and Reg sucked in a cold breath, jammed his hands in his pockets. 

“You broke my phone. By the way,” Reg said.

“What?” He held up the broken phone in question. The screen was cracked, but still entirely operable. “Oh. That. That’s nothing. You should see what Wes can do to an iPhone.”

He slid the phone back into his back pocket with that odd little smile he got sometimes parting his mouth.

“How long have you been with this band?” Reg asked her. The question had an interview-like feel to it and she didn’t care for it.

She rolled her eyes. “For a very long time.”

He crossed his arms over his chest, leaned back against the rail. Not much room out on the balcony; their knees were practically touching. 

“Why?” The question, she decided, was genuine. She didn’t say anything at first, but instead looked up at him. His hair was disheveled a little, top couple buttons undone of his wrinkled shirt. He looked tired, the question asked breathless, as if asked out of an ungovernable curious impulse. 

“My favorite song by the Staton-House Band,” she said, “is “Cul-de-Sac.” They don’t play it all that often, most people have probably forgotten about it.” She fiddled with the label on the beer bottle in her hand. “There’s this part, the two minute and twenty-six second mark of the song, and the lyrics – I can’t do them justice, it’d be wrong to hear them from me first. You have to listen to it. But the song – it just builds and builds, and you think that there, right there, just before the two minute and twenty-six second mark, the chorus will kick in, but _it doesn’t_ , and it’s an entirely different melody, and it. It sounds hopeful and real and impossible and heartbreaking, and if you want to know what,” she stopped suddenly.

“Know what?”

“What I sound like,” she said, smiled to herself. “That. Right there. The two minute and twenty-six second mark. Listen to it. Listen to it and tell me that doesn’t change your life.”

He didn’t say anything and she looked out past him at the lights of the hotel adjacent to theirs. 

Talking with him, it always felt like it was the first time he had ever heard anyone talk about music the way she did. “Evangelical,” he called it; “passionate,” she argued. She thought he was lucky though, in his own ignorant way. She couldn’t remember what it felt like not to know, not to look for, listen for, all the things that mattered to her now. But he told her one night, tired but attentive eyes, an ignored beer in his hand, Kelly Ann in the middle of her treatise on Emmylou Harris and how she had heard her cover of “The Boxer” before the original and how that was the only way she could ever know it now – “Sometimes a song is just a song. It doesn’t have to be a mission statement.” And she had been so disappointed. He hadn’t heard a word she’d said after all, had he. Of course it mattered. Of course the things you loved and the things that spoke to you were personal mission statements. This, right here, was what he is trying to sell. 

Her gaze drifted back to him without meaning to. 

“That’s gotta be what love feels like,” she said. She polished off her beer, wiped at her mouth with the back of her hand.

“What?” he asked again. The confusion on his face looked authentic and interested, authentically interested.

“Being understood,” she said. She had thought that much was obvious. 

 

 

The first time Kelly Ann ever heard “Cul-de-Sac” she was still in high school. The first time she heard it, she understood in a heartbeat why people threw their lives away for mere ideas, because she knew. She would do whatever it took, she’d walk across hot coals or whatever other post-adolescent dramatic imagery she could conjure. She would travel the entire country, the world, and back again, to know the man who wrote this song. That she would follow that band, because that band? They already knew her. They knew, whether they knew it or not, everything about her. 

“Cul-de-Sac" was off the Staton-House Band’s debut album _Joy Hotel_. It came out the fall of her freshman year of high school. The only song anyone really remembers from that album, or bothers to mention a decade-plus later, is “Impossible Machines,” but “Cul-de-Sac” was the seventh song on the album and it was instantly her favorite. The band never recorded another song like “Cul-de-Sac.” She has never decided if that’s something she should feel disappointed about.

 

 

In Duluth, over breakfast, she asked Reg what his favorite song was.

“I don’t know,” he said, shrugged. He went back to picking at the food on his plate. She looked at him, aghast. He blinked up at her, his fork and plate forgotten. She couldn’t accept that.

“That’s unacceptable,” she said. “Every single person has a favorite song.”

Reg set his fork down. He sat back in his chair, scrubbed a hand over his face, into his hair, mussing it. He looked better with messy hair, she thought. She didn’t know why she thought it; didn’t think that was acceptable either. “I don’t know. I never gave much thought, I suppose. Probably something by The Stones, I guess.”

“Probably something by The Stones?” Kelly Ann repeated, drawing each word out with growing horror. 

An amused twist of his mouth, like he was enjoying this. “Tell me then, what is so wrong with The Rolling Stones?”

“It’s not The Rolling Stones that’s the problem. Unless, you know, your favorite song is “Fool to Cry” or “Indian Girl” or something just awful. It’s – dude, that’s such a complete non-answer.”

What Kelly Ann would eventually learn about Reg: he liked all that classic British rock. The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Elton John, David Bowie, there was that brief brush with punk in his youth that got lost somewhere amidst his matriculating musical disinterest post-university, mid-business school. He did have an enduring fondness for _Exile On Main Street_ -era Stones. Which was probably more than tolerable, if you asked Kelly Ann.

In Duluth, she reached across the table and grabbed his plate away from him. His fork fell away and clanged onto the table. “I’m taking this. Go away from me, you’re a disgrace.”

 

 

In between Phoenix and Albuquerque, he road with them on their bus. He plopped down heavily next to her on the bench seat and she raised her eyebrows at him.

“Tell me something. Anything,” he said after a good ten minutes of silence. He leaned a little into her and she blamed the road and the bus and Gooch’s driving for that.

She frowned. “Like what?”

“I don’t know. Something I don’t already know about you.”

“No, you tell me something.”

“You first. I’ve told you more.”

“No you haven’t.” She paused. “What, you wanna know about my first boyfriend or something?” she said scathingly, not entirely sure why her mind immediately leapt to there. 

“Sure, why not. Start there.”

“Ha, well joke’s on you then, friend. Because I technically have never had one.”

“You’ve never had a boyfriend?” he said it soft and like he was amazed or something, which, okay, maybe he was right, maybe she did need to tell him things because this really should hardly come as a surprise. 

She shrugged. “I mean, I’ve kinda dated and there have been guys but there’s never been that whole, you know, thing that people make such a big deal about, or whatever.”

“Love?” he said in that same voice, like she kicked a dog in the process.

“Ugh. Gag me.”

Another pause, and then he said: “I was engaged. Once. Briefly.”

Kelly Ann looked over at him but he was no longer looking at her. “What happened?”

He jerked his shoulder which was probably supposed to be a shrug. “She left me. For someone else.”

“Oh.” Kelly Ann didn’t say anything more, something awkward and uncomfortable accumulating between them. So she blurted out, “It’s weird how no one talks about how fucked it is that Taylor Swift is in space. Like, outer space.”

“Yeah, I’ve been meaning to ask the logistics of that. It’s beyond fucking weird. And then, Shelli, she acts like it’s nothing. Her husband’s in outer space and she’s just –” he shakes his head like there are no words.

“Right? Like can you even imagine you’re married to someone and they’re in outer space. With Taylor Swift.” She leans in towards Reg. “What if he comes back wrong?” she whispers.

Reg’s eyes widen. “Is that possible?”

“I don’t know,” she says, still whispering. “But, like, what if he comes back with space madness. That’s a thing, I’m pretty sure. Or, like, alien bugs lay eggs and they hatch in his head and then he comes back with alien hatchlings eating his brain and then he tries to eat her or lay more eggs.”

“I do not believe that to be a likely outcome.”

“How do you know? You’ve never been in outer space.” She leaned back in her seat, thinking. “You know, I love him, but there’s no way Phil met NASA’s astronaut criteria. Or the criminal background check.”

“And who in space is she playing for? Who is her audience? It’s barren and lifeless up there.”

“It’s all broadcast back down to the earth anyway.” She paused. “Maybe it’s like some Kubrickian fake moon landing shit and they’re all holed up in a soundstage in LA.”

“The moon landing wasn’t fake.”

“No, I know that, but I’m saying if it was.”

Reg frowned. “Why go through all that trouble?”

“Propaganda,” she said on a yawn.

“For the United States?”

“No. Taylor Swift.”

She asked him to give her his phone, curious to see if it was still broken. It was. The fragile screen splintered but still mostly operable. It was also unlocked.

“By all means.” He handed her the damaged phone and went back to watching out the window. Kelly Ann watched him, hooded eyes. Either he had nothing incriminating on this phone at all and that was why he wasn’t watching her use his phone. Or he trusted her that much. Or he was that stupid and lacked the foresight most humans possess. 

Another quick glance his way, and she started thumbing through his open apps. She paused at his iTunes. It was “Cul-de-Sac,” the Staton-House Band, three minutes and forty-nine seconds in. She paused, unsure what it was she was feeling exactly. All she knew was that her chest felt kind of tight but not in a bad way and like her skin wasn’t enough to contain everything in her body. Maybe that was why she did it. She tabbed over to his contacts and started typing.

“What are you doing?” Reg asked, leaning into her, looking down at his phone in her hands. The cracked screen kept scraping against the pad of her thumb.

“Ow,” she said instead, and then, “I’m putting my number in. Just, you know.”

There wasn’t a word she knew to describe the look on his face, but it was a mash-up of surprise and incredulity and, like, maybe?, happiness. “You’re putting your number in my broken phone?”

“It’ll be in the cloud.”

“Sure, the cloud.” he said, the tone of his voice amping up the strange intimacy of the moment. And then he said: “You should send me some of your photos some time.”

She handed his phone back to him. “They’re really not that good.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**7.**

The photo of Rick was what made her famous.

This was at the start, when she was making her money and making a living, a name, out of celebrity photo sessions. The first to launch this career path for her was that singer/songwriter photo shoot that had achieved the same level of intimacy she’d become famous with with Rick had started there. The girl would call Kelly Ann later and leave her a scathing voicemail telling her that she had trusted her; Kelly Ann would never understand how exactly she had violated that trust. 

She had met him at the Chateau Marmont. Of course she met him there; this was a Hollywood story and the location was vital. 

“Hey,” she had said. “You look good.”

“I am good. I’m clean, sober. My only vice now is coffee. And nicotine. And whiskey. Sometimes some grass.” She quirked an eyebrow; his definition of sober took obvious liberties. 

They talked about the band, the dissolution of it, whether he kept in touch with any of them (he didn’t), when was the last time he saw Bill (a year ago, still sober, on tour with The National), how he felt about the end (he was fine, it was time, “I spent my entire adult life with that band, man. I don’t think that’s a good thing.”). He had been fine with Reg selling the boxset, the bootlegs, all of it. They all had, actually. It was Christopher who had blocked it, and it was Christopher, Rick said, who was responsible for the end. “That’s me being uncharitable, but I think I earned that fucking right.” They talked about Natalie – the near-immediate divorce, the lack of a prenup, the rumor she was shacked up with Macklemore now or something. She still sent him emails, he said. Reviews she wrote of the songs Rick played bass for – always earnest and honest and excited. Despite everything, he said, she was still his biggest fan. 

These were the immediate years after the band’s break-up. Christopher had endeavored upon a much maligned solo career, his first album largely panned, Pitchfork calling it “the great disappointment of the 21st century.” Tom Staton had started doing music competition judge shit on television, sitting alongside Adam Levine, telling kids from Indianapolis singing Adele songs they might have a future. Rick was the one with the most shockingly endurable career. He started doing guest tracks on critically-lauded singles, the most famous of which being Beyoncé, and soundtracks for movies that never made it off the festival circuit and into local multiplexes. That was when Kelly Ann was called to the Chateau Marmont to shoot him, and that was where she slept with him.

Looking back, she doesn’t know why she slept with him. She thinks the most generous hindsight determination of it was that it was a desperate attempt to recapture the past. The most honest might be because she had wanted to.

Laying alongside him in the bed after, he had looked at her. “This should be Christopher, man.”

“What do you mean?” she had asked, thinking he meant his career. 

“He always had a thing for you. That blonde rigger. Don’t even think he knew your fucking name.”

“You didn’t even know my fucking name.”

“I didn’t know my fucking name, shit.”

She turned it over in her head though, her and Christopher. And then unbidden: Janine and Reg. She didn’t think of Reg often, not anymore, not in those days, but when she did it was always an unwelcome punch to the gut. She didn’t think it was fair that someone so far removed from her life, someone who hadn’t even been in it all that long, still carried such an effect. It wasn’t fair. 

She accepted the joint when Rick passed it to her and exhaled on a sigh. 

The photos that followed became iconic – for both him and for her. It was Rick Bayless, shirtless and shoeless, his jeans slung low on his bony hips, the button fly half-undone, wandering around the hotel room, sheets strewn on the floor, sex contained in a single frame. In the most famous shot, he’s not facing the camera. Instead, he’s turned toward the door, a bottle of Johnny Walker in hand, his head turned to look back over his shoulder, eyes gazing out at whoever might look at the photo, Kelly Ann’s muted out of focus reflection caught in the mirror behind him. It’s the only photo she released that includes herself. 

That fucking photo. It touched off all these copycats, the voyeuristic self-insert photo making a comeback. Each made the same mistake of erroneously paraphrasing intimacy as sex. It wasn’t the sex that made the photo with Rick so arresting; it was the connection. It was the sense of history; intimacy. It was Rick looking at you like he knew you, he remembered you, he would remember you. And then you saw Kelly Ann in the mirror, small, face hidden by the camera, bare legs crossed, hair tangled. He wasn’t looking at you at all.

 

 

She got a lot of shit for that. Think piece after think piece came out about the relationship between photographer and subject, about women in male-dominated industries, about what it means to be a slut. Those articles were Kelly Ann’s secret favorite because of all the accusations lobbied her way, that was the newest and the least applicable. As more and more people learned her name, as more and more people talked about her in the same breathless tone formerly reserved for nude celebrity photo leaks or Kim Kardashian-West, she found the Dorothy Parker adage to be true: I don’t care what is written about me, so long as it isn’t true.

“I’m not interested in the prerequisites to earn the title of slut. I’m not interested in the term at all.” 

She said it offhand during a larger interview with _Vanity Fair_ , but that became the soundbite. 

Kelly Ann didn’t like fame, so she didn’t court it. She stepped away from Hollywood and from musicians and instead starting photographing thing she considered to be real.

The empty house series came next. She did a book of portraits, like Abby Van Ness had done. She had to introduce Abby at some women in the arts event and Kelly Ann sang her praises and called her an inspiration, and it was then that she began to fear she was counterfeit. It was then she realized how easy it was to change the narrative from one of humiliation into motivation. She was constantly changing the narrative – they all were. That was the business. Rick in that hotel room. Abby Van Ness on that stage. I don’t care so long as it isn’t true.

Janine. 

She understood Janine for the first time standing at the podium at that women in the arts luncheon. The world had conjured her into someone else.

 

 

 

 

**8.**

Intimacy was earned and accrued easily with any crew. You learned everything without wanting to about the people around you.

So Kelly Ann thought nothing of saying, “Come in,” when there was a knock at the bathroom door. They were in a motel in Las Vegas, a framed photo of the Rat Pack over the beds, Kelly Ann stuck sharing a room with her brother. The punishments continued to endure for daring to defect for all five minutes from the tour. Christ, she didn’t even make it out of the parking lot and she was back to lowest man on the totem pole. Still. Now, it was back to the story of her life: sharing with Wes. There was a party already raging on the other side of the bathroom door, and of course there was. It was Wes. He was a magnet for attention, like the North or South Pole, insisting everyone and everything including weather patterns and ocean tides and stupidly brave adventurers be drawn to him. A party was inevitable. 

Kelly Ann was only wearing a towel, the towel loosely gathered around her, her wet hair piled on top of her head, lone rivulets dripping down the nape of her neck, speckling her bare shoulders. “Come in,” she said around her toothbrush, her mouth full of foam. 

The door opened. It was Reg.

Her mouth dropped open a little, but then, his did too (he at least didn’t have any minty spit dripping down his chin).

“Oh, Christ.” Reg held a hand up shielding his eyes, even though the threadbare towel, short as it was, covered any and all of the objectionably inappropriate bits. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean,” he stammered, but curiously, had yet to leave the doorway. “I had to piss, and you said come in, and.”

Kelly Ann clutched the towel tighter to her; she noticed how his gaze keeps drifting despite himself down to the bare side of her breast. She wasn’t sure if she’d rather wrap herself in the shower curtain or see how much more flustered he could get – grin and drop the towel. Instead she spat into the sink. 

“Chill out, man,” she said. She nodded towards the toilet. The bathroom was humid from the hot water, the mirror still slightly fogged up. “By all means. Scandalize me.”

She didn’t really mean it, more of a hypothetical dare on her part. And it was worth it for the wild-eyed look of panic on his face. But it wasn’t just panic, it was – what? A desire to meet that dare? He acted so often like the zookeeper thrown in with the monkeys but rather than trying to escape, there was a desperation to behave like them. Be one of them. It was almost sweet. 

Neither said anything, a strange and increasingly intimate stand-off, but they were looking at each, sizing each other up. She could feel when it started to turn into something more dangerous. Like what if he shut the door and what if she dropped her towel and what if he kept looking at her like that would he do something about it or would she have to and what if –

“I need to – get some clothes,” she said finally.

“Right,” he said. She watched how he sucked in a quick breath when she approached him and the door. 

It was like one of those slow-motion car crashes or those collisions that occur only in dreams, where they were obvious they were about to happen but no one did anything about it, but just let it happen. Or maybe it wasn’t a question of allowing it but rather being unable to stop it. Even in the slow-motion passage of one immovable object into another there wasn’t enough time or enough strength to alter their paths. The press of her damp body against his solid body, his wrinkled suit, as she passed him through the door. Her bare shoulder, his chest, her covered hip, his, the brief press of chest to chest. 

She made the mistake of looking up at him as she passed. She felt like every part of her was prickling and alert. Reg’s mouth was slack, his hands curled into fists at his side. 

“All yours,” she nodded towards the bathroom. It smelled like her shampoo and her mint toothpaste, the underlying cleaning product mildew of all motels. 

He looked down at her and only nodded. He shut the door.

Being around him had given her this whole bodily awareness she didn’t think she ever had with another person. She was constantly and acutely aware of how close his body was to hers or how far away, the heat of him, each and every accidental touch shared between them. She stockpiled them all inside of her, the same way she imagined an attorney would comply evidence to present or an accountant would gather debts accrued and owed. Reg’s fingers fast on her wrist when he wanted her attention, the bump of her shoulder against the width of his chest, bodies knocking into each other accidentally, the measured distance between them when they spoke, the terrified awareness she had of how little it would take to close the gap. Not that she would. Not that she wanted to. But she thought about it sometimes, the same way anyone might think about doing anything stupid and self-destructive. Walking into traffic, touching a hot stove, screaming a litany of profanity at the top of your lungs in a crowded room. What if she touched him. What if she put her hands on him and what if he put his hands on her. What then.

 

 

 

 

 

**9.**

Reg’s apartment is beautiful – impersonal and immaculate. It matches his wife. 

Kelly Ann is late to the dinner party. She never did call him back, but instead decided, in a last minute fit of pique and determination, to go. She brought an overly expensive bottle of wine that was a gift for Sam. Sam doesn’t drink wine; he only drinks whiskey and he smokes a pack of cigarettes a day, he has a tattoo of an anchor on his arm, and Kelly Ann is acutely aware she is dating a Brooklyn musician stereotype. 

She had lied, before she left the apartment, about where she was going. She doesn’t usually lie to Sam, not out of moral compunction, but because he rarely if at all cares what she does. That makes him sound bad. It’s not bad. He trusts her, he gives her free reign. He had a concert to play down in Bushwhick and wouldn’t have questioned her about where she was going, dressed like that. She’s wearing an old black slip dress that looks like something a Courtney Love acolyte in the 90s would have worn, complete with the platform sandals, and the too-dark lipstick, her mouth heavy as bruised fruit.

Reg doesn’t say anything to her, just nods at her from across the room. She’s nervous, and she wants to hate him for that. In the years since she’s seen him, she had thought she had grown into a person who doesn’t get nervous because of a man. But it’s hard for her to look at him. Hard not to remember everything, unfair that it still feels fresh. 

She’s nervous with the red wine Leigh hands her and greedily drinks it down, afraid she might spill. She doesn’t know anyone here, not really, though she vaguely recognizes some people from the various gallery openings she’s attended against her will.

“I’m glad you could come,” Leigh says, and Kelly Ann smiles at her, fearful the wine might have stained her teeth, smeared her lipstick. 

“I don’t know if you know this,” Leigh says, the two of them standing together at the edge of the room, near a painting that screams money more so than taste, “but Reg has kept up with your work.”

“I didn’t know that,” Kelly Ann says.

“He bought all your books. Two copies of them, in fact. Two copies of them all. He keeps one at the office and one here in our apartment.” Her eyes are flinty but warm as they watch Kelly Ann’s face. Searching for weaknesses, Kelly Ann thinks, looking for a way in to figure her, and by extension Reg, out. Leigh should have been a detective, Kelly Ann thinks. She would look the most at home under the fluorescent lights in an interrogation room, on the suspicious and questioning side of the table. 

Kelly Ann feels her face flush though, and she doesn’t say anything more than, “Oh.”

“Yes,” his wife says, and “I should thank him for the sales,” Kelly Ann finally says, mouth twisting and compressing into a punch-drunk grin.

 

 

Reg corners her by the powder room after dinner. 

“We haven’t had a chance to talk tonight,” he says. 

Her mouth twists. “I thought that was of your own design,” she says. Christ, she’s drunk. Leigh kept feeding her wine and she kept drinking it, no one but Leigh for her to talk to at her end of the table. What had they talked about? She thinks she told her about Reg bringing down a curse on the bus but she hadn’t told it well. She might have mentioned Janine? God, what is wrong with her. 

She moves to step around him, but he catches her arm. His hand is warm against the bare skin and it’s stupid, it’s so unfair and dumb what that does to her. She had thought – what had she thought? That she had closed that chapter of her life? That she was done with it, done with him, that she had a future all laid out for her full of people who thought they knew her? It all comes back though, doesn’t it? How much like herself she’s always felt around him, how he brings something bright out in her, how maybe she could have loved him. How maybe that is what love is – this all-encompassing, crushing and bone-aching, never-ending, desire to consume. 

“I wanted to talk to you,” he says, and she wobbles in her heels a little as she turns to face her.

“Then talk.”

He looks incredibly serious. Age has made him look that much sterner but also softer – it’s an odd contradiction: sad eyes with harsh lines around them, that thin mouth of his. 

“I came back,” he says softly. It’s hard to hear him; there’s Coltrane playing in the other room, threatening to drown him out. 

“What?”

“I came back.” He’s surer this time. “I got off the plane. Seven years ago, I came back. You were already gone.” 

Kelly Ann can feel how he her eyes are staring back at him. “What are you talking about,” she says, quiet and afraid.

“I came back. I had wanted,” he clears his throat, looks down and then back into her face. “To be with you. I had wanted to be with you.”

Her pulse thuds heavily, loud enough she’s sure he must hear it. “Oh.” Once again, it’s all she says. 

He leans closer to her, and her breath goes ragged, her eyes tracking his mouth, thinking he might kiss her. But, no –

He rubs his thumb over her mouth, smearing the lipstick.

“I thought I’d moved on,” he says idly, like he’s talking more to himself than to her. Her knees are weak.

 

 

 

 

**10.**

Her favorite Fleetwood Mac song is “Silver Springs.” Her favorite version of it is from the sessions and the rough takes they released on the deluxe _Rumors_ album. It’s quieter than the version released on the original B-side or the live version released in the 90s. It’s quieter, and you can hear it – you can hear everything in Stevie’s voice. You can hear that she means every single word. Kelly Ann spent a long time hoping, perversely, that her heart would be broken just so that song would apply to her life the way she always wanted it to. That she could understand Stevie too, what it feels like to perfectly communicate a heartbreak, that _you’ll never get away from the sound of the woman who loves you_.

 

 

 

 

**11.**

She traveled, after the whole Rick thing. After she shot too many celebrities and received too much of a celebrity focus herself. She went abroad, went to photograph the things she classified as real. She became that person, who drew a demarcation line between the real and the unreal. She started listening to music again, this time as a hobby and not a part of the job. She found she didn’t miss it, any of it. She felt she had grown, that the woman she was now wouldn’t have fit on that bus. She wondered if she ever had fit on that bus.

 

 

There are certain types of people built for the road. People like her, and people like Wes. Rootless, she thinks, is the word for people like them. They never found a place they were willing to plant themselves, or maybe they never found a place willing to take them. 

When you’ve never really had a home, what you do instead is carve out the small places that fit around you where you feel the most yourself. These are not homes, but they belong to you as if they were. The basement couch at Tricia Gifford’s house with the old television and VCR where Kelly Ann watched movies she rented from the library, fixating on Debbie Harry in Cronenberg’s _Videodrome_ to the point where she bought a poster of her even though she never hung it anywhere. Funny, she had thought, how she became a Blondie devotee not initially through their music but rather Debbie Harry and her face in _Videodrome_. She thought sometimes that was how it worked: you came at things in a circuitous path. You came at things at your own pace and by a design unclear until it was over. She thought maybe writing a song was that way, too: you didn’t know where you were going until you reached that final chord.

The passenger seat next to Gooch in the late night hours when the road lit up ahead by the bus’s lights is dark and empty, like something out of a David Lynch nightmare. The comfort of going nowhere. She never wised up to realize that wasn’t necessarily a good thing. At that time of night and with the stretch of dark asphalt ahead that matched the dark night sky above there were no divisions between good and bad, between past and future. There was only the present. The now. And she knew how to do that: she could live in the now. She could travel through it, even if it meant she was going nowhere at all.

 

 

 

 

**12.**

She sleeps with him a week after the dinner party.

It is the first time they have slept together. 

Kelly Ann goes back to his apartment, the white walls, the white furniture, futuristic and spare, Reg the only unpolished aspect of it. Leigh is in Washington. It’s the first thing he tells her when he finds her at his door.

“Okay,” she says. “I didn’t come to see her.”

A lot of time has passed, and with it, she thinks, a lot of regret. She’s turned it over in her head again and again what he had said to her: he came back for her. He came back for her, and she wasn’t there. She has turned that over, she has turned each and every little and dumb interaction between them over inside her, like she is trying to take all these scrap parts and build them into something she can enter and own. With him. 

So she does it, right there, in his doorway, the stairs at her back and the apartment at his – she kisses him. She leans forward and kisses him hard, hard enough to make her front teeth snag against his bottom lip and he hisses into her mouth.

Anticipation is the part that makes anything worth wanting. The dimmed stage lights, the rolling cry of the crowd when the band appears, the promise contained in that very first chord played. This is what you came for, is what they’re saying. The wait was worth it. The wait was part of the prize.

 

 

Reg is soft, there’s a softness to him. He’s not fat, and to even call him chubby would be an act of cruel generosity, but he’s soft. She likes the hot press of his flesh against hers, how he gives, how she can melt into him. Not like the bony boys she’s fucked before, all the bladed scythes for hips and ribcage stairways to heaven.

“This is probably a bad idea,” she says.

“Yeah,” he says. He pulls back slightly. “Do you want me to – ” he doesn’t say stop.

Impulsively, she grabs the front of his shirt and says, “No.” His eyes flare, his hands on her hips, body closing in on her. He’s looking at her – so full of everything. Panic bursts through her.

“This doesn’t – ” she pauses, swallows, watches his gaze dip down to her throat. “I’m not emotionally available,” she says, sagely. 

His eyes darken. “I know. I’m not either,” like lines two actors delivering in an unwatched play: perfunctory, necessary. 

Closer now, her hand caught and trapped between them. “Then it’s fine,” she whispers, her wet mouth smearing over his. Then it’s not a bad idea at all. No one can get hurt here.

 

 

She’s so wet already, she’s been thinking about this since – god, for too long. Too embarrassingly long. He’s kinda rough with her, which is turning her on, how he can’t get her shirt out of the way fast enough, her arms stuck in the sleeves as she arches her back, trying to peel it off. Reg loses patience and slides a hand between her legs, fingers thick against her, clumsily rubbing at her through her jeans, her hips rolling down against him. Overwhelming, like an out-of-body experience, except not, because she’s never felt so aware of herself. He grunts when he finally gets her jeans down her legs, her underwear tangled with it at her ankles, and his fingers find her bare. He looks down at her and her bare chest, her contorted arms – “get this off,” he grits out, so she sits up, her forehead knocking against his but not hard enough to hurt, and she kisses him, lets him shove the shirt off her shoulders with his free hand. Her own hands grab at him, wanting – wanting everything. Her body feels too responsive, making her greedy and needy.

He drags her body on top of his, her legs spread wide, rubbing against him. She wraps her arms tight around him. He’s thick inside of her, and she hisses, but it’s good, it’s good, it’s finally happening. The headboard wobbles loudly against the wall as they first start to rock against each other, her body bent forward in half, clutching at his shoulders. Reg bucks up harder against her, increasingly rough with her, stronger than she would’ve given him credit for, or maybe it’s just relative. She’s so small compared to him.

It’s that kind of utterly filthy, debauched and hungry sex she was never entirely sure was real outside of porn. It’s like she’s bottomless, all slick sweat, sheets sticking to her. “Please,” she stammers out into her bent arm wrapped around him, her body bent in half, her head dropping forward, damp hair hiding her face from him, his mouth at her shoulder, her collarbone, her breast, hand knotted in her hair, fingers biting into the nape of her neck, hand spanning her throat; she can feel teeth and her fingers curl, his hands too slick on her hips, he keeps losing his grip, his blunt fingernails scratching at her wet skin, but she’s coming, “ _Please_ ,” and he’s got her already begging for more. She wonders if sex is like this all the time for everyone or if she has stumbled on a super well-kept secret. Maybe this is totally what Prince was singing about all the time.

Reg rolls them, gets her under him; harder and faster this way, the angle different, and she’s dimly aware of saying “oh, fuck, oh, fuck, oh fuck fuck fuck,” into his throat.He gathers her damp hair up in a fist and pulls and she chokes on a moan, wants to beg him to pull harder, her entire body arching for him. The sounds he makes, like his mouth is sticking together, low grunts, snatches of words, her name, rougher and rougher, neither trying to hide here. 

He groans, and she can’t keep her mouth shut, no longer even really saying anything except what sounds like _yes_ and _please_ and _Reg_ , his name over and over again, on a loop, scratchy like playback on vinyl.

His face is stupid and open when he comes, like a Dickensian child beggar or something, someone who just wants more.

 

 

After, she gets out of the bed, naked, her legs still trembling and without a word she shuts the bathroom door behind her. Come-streaked thighs which is both disgusting and hot. She can feel herself starting to freak out when she sits down on the toilet. All these conflicting motivations collide inside of her. Her toes curl against the chilled tiled floor. She flushes, stands in front of the mirror, running water in the sink. She stares at herself. There is already a reddening bite mark on the underside of her breast, on old bruise on her hip, a new one on her thigh she can’t see in the mirror but she can feel, the ghostly pressure of his hand imprinted into her skin. There’s stubble burn on her neck, along her collarbone. Her lips look swollen and used, this wide-eyed fucked-up look to her, her hair wild.

She smiles at herself.

 

 

 

 

**13.**

Their first kiss was a good kiss. It was the sort of kiss she imagined a woman in a novel would throw her life away for (or a woman in a movie, a montage of images tripping through her head of fictional women thoroughly kissed and soon-to-be-thoroughly fucked (literal or otherwise) and destroyed(. He wasn’t supposed to kiss her like that, she was pretty sure of it.

She didn’t know what she had expected him to kiss like, but not like this. She expected awkwardness, she supposed, that same skittish nervousness to him. But it wasn’t like that at all. Instead, he was all raw certainty and purpose, no real tactical approach to it but instead just want. He wanted this. He wanted her. She was all flustered by it, but she kissed him back, didn’t even think about it, just opened her mouth as he opened his, her arms braced at her side, hands rigor mortis stiff and clenched. It hit her hard, left her breathless.

It skidded far and hard into a filthier realm once they were alone on the bus – none of the curious romance, the salty wind in her hair, the beach right there, his mouth soft on hers. 

Instead it was desperation and hunger – her telling him that this didn’t mean means she was going to fuck him, don’t get any ideas, and he just laughed at her, a quiet low rumble, his breath hot on her mouth, and she had wanted to tell him not to laugh like that – if he had to laugh at her, make it mean, mocking and harsh, not this disbelieving burst she quickly smothered with her own mouth. Not so fond. 

She let her teeth scrape his bottom lip before she pulled away only for Reg to follow her.

And Shelli was right, Kelly Ann thought, when Reg kissed her again – the memory distant, like something watched on a staticky TV set or heard on an out-of-range radio. It was like hearing a song for the first time: you thought you discovered it. You thought you were the first person to ever feel like this. But, no, Shelli had been talking about love, and this wasn’t love. Would Kelly Ann even recognize love if it walked through the door? If it looked her in the eye and asked her to stay. If it watched her like it knew her, if it grabbed her face and kissed her. 

A quiet whimper escaped from her mouth as she pulled him closer; sort of like a gasp from him, his mouth opening wider.

They were both drunk so Kelly Ann thought that meant this didn’t really count. Like they were in some sort of situational limbo, not just from the alcohol, but because they were alone on the bus and this wasn’t a real tour stop. They had found their way into the margins. Made her think of Gooch, and how he’d talk about missing his wife and how that was a good thing. There was a thing he’d say about the margins. Her head was too cloudy and her mouth was too much a part of Reg’s for her to consider the thought further than: there were so many things she trusted simply because they came from someone else.

Reg was the one to pull back from her, panted the word, “Europe,” so she laughed. So she sat up and he turned away from her, and then Phil died and the band was finished and there never was a Europe after all.

 

 

 

 

**14.**

Early morning, and Kelly Ann is alone in the back of a cab. Kelly Ann rides in the backseat, staring out the window – the wet asphalt, the damp smell of early morning as the sun weakly shines through the trees. That quiet early morning sadness.

Reg left a bruised hickey on her neck that she presses with her fingers when she gets back to her apartment. She hisses, feels an answering clench between her legs. That low thick tide of want and desire tied to the memory of his mouth on her neck. The feel of him hard against her leg, her tilting her hips up into him, wanting some sort of friction, the taste of his mouth, the weight of him on her. It’s like time travel or teleportation or that moment in the movie when the amnesiac gets his memories back and sees everything in a new light.

She thinks _Sam_ , and waits for something to curdle within her, disappointed in herself when it doesn’t happen. So that’s the end, she thinks. That’s the end of that. 

They break up that evening, as unceremonious as their engagement. He doesn’t ask her if there’s someone else. She’s grateful she doesn’t have to lie.

 

 

 

 

**15.**

She has a photo they’re both in, from the tour. Portland, she thinks. It had jarred Kelly Ann the first time she saw it, how she saw them. It was so painfully obvious. 

It’s a candid photo, of a whole group of them seated around a table. It’d be less embarrassing of a photograph if in it it was him looking at her. It’s not – it’s her, watching him. He’s not even doing anything: Wes is the one holding court, his mouth open and Donna’s mouth open too, in a laugh. Reg is watching, listening to Wes, his attention focused on him. And there’s Kelly Ann, across the table from him, her arms folded on the edge of the table, her mouth soft, her gaze fixed on Reg.

 

 

“It took him a week,” Leigh says to Kelly Ann. “Before he told me.”

They are at a bistro. Leigh had called Kelly Ann’s assistant and asked to make lunch plans. She knows, Kelly Ann had thought, and still – she went.

“Told you what?” Kelly Ann asks, afraid. She feels so young again, on uneven and unsure footing. Like everyone is looking at her as a version of herself she has never wanted to be: vulnerable. 

Leigh has fine-boned, delicate hands. Her nails are painted a pale pink. The nails suit her; the pack of cigarettes in her hand don’t. She removes one from the pack with surgical precision, as if the act of smoking is a deliberate choice, a part of the role she is currently playing, that of the betrayed wife. 

She tells Kelly Ann how Reg had showed her the book. The photograph. “That’s my shoe,” he said. She lets it sit there in the air between her and Kelly Ann, the rest unsaid.

“We had stolen a dozen eggs. No, eleven eggs. Only eleven, that’s important. There was a dead body,” Kelly Ann says.

“What?”

“Nothing.” A pause. “It was a long time ago.”

“And yet.”

And yet. It’s there, he fact that Kelly Ann and Reg have been sleeping together right there, unspoken in the air between them. Leigh never will say it. Kelly Ann knows that now. That was the purpose of this lunch, to say _I know_ without the words. To say it with other words.

 

 

Kelly Ann had included that photo of Reg’s foot she had taken back in Louisville. It was in her book of portraits, at the end. All those faces and then – a shoe. Her editor hadn’t liked it. You’ve taken better photos, she had said. That wasn’t the point, Kelly Ann hadn’t said. Instead what she said was: I like it. And then: it has to be here. And it did. It was, in a lot of ways, a beginning.

 

 

 

 

**16.**

She’s in a coffeeshop when “Janine” starts to play. Behind her, she hears two girls talking.

“Oh, my god. Can you even imagine someone loving you enough to write that?”

No, Kelly Ann doesn’t say. She couldn’t. 

 

 

Every love song is a manipulation – someone telling you how to feel, pulling at all the strings that hold you upright, four minutes at a time. It burrows in, parasitic. Lives off the emotion that builds inside. Like, take Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” versus Whitney Houston’s. That key change. That made hearts break and feel. Anyone who has ever tried to be an American Idol could tell you about that.

“So, like, sex is just like a love song, too, you know? It’s manipulative. It makes you feel things that aren’t real, or, like, an echo of something that is, or was, real. The right chords with the right words and oh wow, hey, his dick is just right, and suddenly, you think you’re feeling real things when it’s really just, like, whatever the lovestruck dick-struck equivalent of, I don’t know, romantic gaslighting via power ballads is, and – ”

“Oh my god, would you please shut up,” Donna said.

 

 

 

 

**17.**

She tries to end it with him. 

She’s always liked herself with Reg, even when she shouldn’t. 

“We’re not doing this anymore.”

“We’re not?” The way he says it pisses her off – doubting, comical. She snaps her head towards him and he’s looking at her the way he always looks at her: all fond and pleased and anticipatory. She takes an aggressive bite of his scone.

“We’re not,” she says, her mouth full.

“And why’s that.” It’s not quite a question and his gaze has drifted down to her mouth like just talking about not fucking each other anymore is the same thing as trying to think of white elephants or however that works: you can’t stop thinking about it. 

“What? I need to put in my two weeks notice with official documentation?”

Curiosity is sharp in his eyes and his mouth does this smile-grimace-smirk twist she knows not to trust. “I fear that would lack a bit much in the name of discretion.” He steps away from her and the table and she feels more off-balance than she had before he down. He nods once at her, awkward, ungainly, why did she even start fucking him in the first place? She has to look up at him to meet his eyes and she kinda wishes she hadn’t, more than kinda wishes she had never met him, because there’s that same hot loose-limbed, tightly-wound heat that has been stalking her for seven years. “But, um, understood,” he says, “and duly noted.”

 

 

He lasts a full three days before he is knocking at her door. 

Her apartment is small, a studio, the bed mocking them. He sits on the edge of it andKelly Ann approaches him, stands over him before lowering herself into his lap All very slow and deliberate like each step forward is a negotiation silently settled. 

“What are you,” he starts and then he stops. His voice is a lot lower than usual, and that’s … something. “Am I supposed to tell you this isn’t a good idea? Remind you that it was you who ended this?” He says it quickly, like it has to be included in the record for posterity or actual honest to god due diligence. 

“Probably,” she says, just as quietly. Now that he’s here, now that he’s under her, ending this seems impossible. Misguided. “But. We’re friends, right?”

“Friends,” he repeats, voice gravel rough and low.

She settles herself more firmly against him, feels his whole body stiffen. “Friends.” He’s finally touching her now, his hands on her thighs, hot through her jeans. That look on his face, like he wants her, but there’s a question there – how he doesn’t like how she has to justify herself with him.

 

 

He fucks her slow, slower than she likes. 

“Come on,” she says, writhing under him. “What are you waiting – ” she loses her words in a huff of breath when he solidly fucks back into her. So slow as he drags back out, in again, his hand gripping the underside of her thigh too tight, lifting and bending her leg, fucks in that much deeper. He grunts when she clenches around him, involuntary, Kelly Ann gasping, head buzzing. 

“I like it slow,” he says, mouth at the underside of her jaw, his mouth hot and wet. It’s too intense, his face right there, watching hers as she watches him. He watches her come that first time, rolls right through her, the same sort of small orgasm she normally brings herself off with on her own. She stupidly thinks that’s it at first, but he keeps fucking her. “Oh my god,” she breathes, and he likes that, hears how the start of a rough laugh sticks in his throat. It ramps up fast from there, Kelly Ann clinging to him, saying all sorts of awful desperate shit while he fucks her, begging him, telling him how she thinks about this all the time, thinks about him –

 

 

The sun is setting. Kelly Ann sits naked and alone in her bed watching Reg dress.

“I’m leaving Leigh,” he says. Something heavy drops inside of her. This is too real. This is – she pictures Leigh at lunch, her pale bony hands, her white apartment. She hears Reg, bundles the sheets around her as she listens. He is saying: they should’ve been together all this time, they’ve missed out on seven years with each other, and, just like that, Kelly Ann is mad. She’s done so much in those seven years; had she been with him, would she have had any of that? 

He looks offended when she asks that, hurt, maybe, that she hadn’t thought of him with the same pang of absence and loss. She did, but she can’t reveal that hand. Not now. Not with the gnarled, knotted fear she can feel threatening inside of her: that it’s Janine all over again. She’s his Janine. He’s in love with an outdated model of her.

“I’m in love with you,” he says to her. His voice kind is ragged, like he’s begging her for something here. Reciprocity, maybe.

“No you’re not.”

“But I am. I have been.”

“No,” she says harder. “You’re not. You’re in love with an idea of me. With who I used to be.”

He shakes his head. “You’re still you, Kelly Ann.”

The room glows red with the setting sun; she feels claustrophobic. 

“You’re not in love with me,” she repeats. Her voice doesn’t even sound like her: shaky and barely restrained. “That girl? Doesn’t exist anymore. She’s a fraud. I’m a fraud. Don’t you know that? I thought everyone knew that. I got lucky with one photograph and everyone thinks I’m someone else, and you – you can’t be in love with me. You can’t.”

“What are you talking about?” He looks so sad and she can’t decide which is worse: if he’s sad for himself or sad for her or sad for the both of them. “I know you,” he says, gently, too gentle, and she wants to hate him. “I know you,” he repeats.

“I think you should leave now,” she says. He glances back at her, just the once. It’s that glance she made famous. He looks at her over his shoulder, the fading sunlight filtering in. This was what people thought they were seeing: this is the real thing. 

It’s Reg looking back at you like he knows you.

 

 

 

 

**18.**

Shelli calls her back, months later.

“Well, holy fucking shit as I live and fucking breathe, how the fuck are you, kid?”

Kelly Ann laughs, but it’s too breathless and sad sounding and she hopes Shelli can’t tell. 

They catch up and talk, Kelly Ann finally reveals that she ran into Reg, that she and Reg –

“Jesus Christ.” Kelly Ann hadn’t meant to tell her; that wasn’t why she called. She didn’t want her to think that was why she called.

“He grew a beard,” Kelly Ann says. “It looks weird.” Shelli laughs.

“God, I’ve fucking missed you.” Despite herself, Kelly Ann can feel her eyes tearing up. She doesn’t say anything, and neither does Shelli. 

“Those were some good times, right?” Kelly Ann finally says.

“Yeah,” Shelli says after too long of a beat. “Imperfect, but good.” Kelly Ann wonders if she’s thinking about her ex-husband or if she’s thinking about Bill or how they didn’t know this was the last tour for the Staton-House Band. She thinks that’s the best way to exit: unaware, even of the end yourself.

“I know you can’t go back, but. I don’t know how to keep the past and the present separate.” She tells Shelli, her voice quiet and sad.

“Oh, honey. No one can.”

"I don't think I'm me anymore." She has started to cry.

Shelli laughs softly. "You are. I can fucking hear it."

 

 

 

 

**19.**

There was a brief period of time when Kelly Ann would not stop listening to Marianne Faithfull records on vinyl. _Rich Kid Blues_ in particular, her cover of Bob Dylan’s “Visions of Johanna.” She was lonely and nineteen, twenty, perpetually out of work so she spent her time listening to Marianne on vinyl and subsisted on a diet of celery and vodka and Marlboro Lights. It was the thinnest she had ever been and everything in her life then had been thin. Her patience, her focus, her desire for anything at all. She kept listening to “Visions of Johanna” on repeat and called it the saddest song in the world. She’d say that without irony and instead with an earnestness Wes, of all people, declared he couldn’t witness. There were sadder parts of the song than others, that’s what she would say, and she tried to make Wes understand that. Understand that _Mona Lisa must have had the highway blues, you can tell by the way she smiles_.

“I don’t like you like this,” Wes had said, flat and ungiving. Kelly Ann had shaken her head, waved her hand, dismissive.

“That’s irrelevant. No one does. But are you listening? Do you hear her voice? Do you hear it?” You believe every word.

 

 

 

 

**20.**

“Hiya, Gooch.”

“I’ve been waiting for you.” Kelly Ann chuckled, popped a Frito in her mouth.

They rode in silence. “It’s good to miss people. I do believe that. Missing someone? It does the heart good. Love lives in the margins. You gotta give it space to grow.” 

“It’s easier not to,” Kelly Ann said. “If you don’t love anyone, no one gets to stop loving you.”

“Yeah,” Gooch said. “But what a quiet lonely road to drive.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Gooch.”

“You do. You’re no dummy.” He glanced at her and then back at the road.

 

 

 

 

**21.**

She seeks him out, weeks later. She stops by his office, has to all but bribe his secretary to let her through.

“What are you doing here?” he asks when she shuts the door behind her. She stands very still in front of his desk and takes a deep breath.

“ _I’ll love you with all the madness in my soul,_ ” she quotes.

He stares at her with wide bright eyes and something lurches in her. This is suddenly the worst idea she’s ever had. And she’s had so many bad ideas.

“Bruce Springsteen,” she says weakly. 

“Yeah,” he says. “I knew that one.”

““Born to Run,”” she says. “It’s a classic, for good reason.”

The two of them stare at each other. She’s thought about this moment endlessly since he left her apartment. Since he left seven years ago, if she’s being honest with herself. What she would say when she saw him again. What she would say if she was brave. That long list of things she thought she wanted to say to him. That she was sorry, that he didn’t do anything to deserve her treating him like that. That she’s missed him. That nothing was the same without him – first, seven years ago, and now, the same – and that that made her furious, because that’s just unfair. What right does he have to come stepping in, uprooting her entire life and and and –

“I do,” she says instead. “And, I – I will.”

He squints. “You do what?”

“Love you with all the madness in my soul,” she says, too fast, the words running into each other and she looks down at the floor and she can feel her heart pounding and she wishes someone would come crashing through and punch her in the face or kindly murder her a little because this whole emotional honesty thing is terrible. It’s untenable. How did the band do it? How does Bruce do it? Or anyone, really. Reg. How do they take what they’re feeling and put it out there and mean it. How do they keep themselves from shying away from everything they've just put out there.

“Kelly Ann,” he says. He is standing now. She hates the way he says her name. It’s the same way she used to say Staton-House Band or Marianne Faithfull. Like it meant something. With reverence. 

She blinks up at him too fast, her mouth twisting from a fake smile to a grimace and then settles out into a grim flat line. “It’s fine if you don’t I’m not saying it trying to get you to say anything to me because I guess you already said it first anyway, didn’t you, and I was kinda awful about it but I’m kinda awful all the time in general and I think you should know that, if you still want to know me, and you don’t have to say anything, but I just thought I’d come see you, and here you are, and I,” she stops, suddenly out of words and out of nerve. 

“Kinda a cop-out to use someone else’s words but that’s sometimes all we have.” She says it very sage and very serious and she can see him trying to smother the smile twisting the corner of his mouth. “I’m being very serious,” she says.

The smile blooms in full. “I know,” he tells her, aligning his face as serious as he can. “You always are.”

 

 

Do you have the space inside of you for one more love song?

“Tell me something about yourself,” Reg had said. “Tell me anything.” They were in New Orleans and they had only just met. They were in the trailer he got rid of after Memphis. They were in his motel bed, the sheets smelling of stale laundry and their bodies. A bar in Milwaukee, a hotel lobby in Los Angeles, the bus dark and gliding down the highway, Reg’s face right there, cast in twilight shadow.

“Tell me everything,” he said. “I want to understand.”

So she did.

 

 

 

 

**22.**

“You’re wrong, babe,” Donna had said. “You know that right? It’s not a … manipulation, or whatever you said. Not always – fuck, not even most the time. It’s real, and it’s true. It found your heart and touched it.” She looked at Kelly Ann. “It’s not a bad thing.”

Shelli said to Kelly Ann: “It’s like hearing a really good song for the first time, you know? Falling in love. For awhile there, you think you’re the first person to discover it.”

“I have to be a fan, or I’m nothing.” That was what Kelly Ann had said. 

She makes a decision: she’s going to make a documentary about the band.

 

 

 

 

**23.**

Her favorite film scene is the end scene from _The Graduate_.

Reg and her are sitting side-by-side next to each other. They’re sitting beside each other, shoulder-to-shoulder. Kelly Ann likes this, how they have to make an effort to look at each other or if they’re not that brave yet they can stare straight ahead and not see each other at all. They are waiting for a plane. Someone once told her she was always on the run. Maybe it was Phil, or it was Wes, or the man she knew she’d never actually marry. Always on the run. They said it like a bad thing, but she doesn’t think –

She glances quickly up at Reg and catches him glancing down at her. She looks away fast, mashes her mouth down, trying to stamp out the bright smile still pulling at the corners of her lips. Beside her, she feels him start to laugh. He quiets, and when she looks at him, his gaze is faraway, her mouth soft and even.

So, a love song.

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> widespindriftgaze @ tumblr


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